Before it became the streaming giant that it is today, Netflix was a DVD rental business founded in 1997. Just a year later, e-commerce behemoth?Amazon?was interested in acquiring it. But things did not go as per Amazon's plan.
In 1998,?Amazon founder?Jeff Bezos?offered $15 million for?Netflix, which was then just a one-year-old company. But surprisingly, Netflix co-founders Marc Randolph and?Reed Hastings?turned down his offer, and the rest, as we know, is history.
And now, about 25 years after the incident,?Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph tweeted about the reasons for turning down Amazon¡¯s mega offer in 1998.??
¡°25 years ago, in 1998, Reed and I flew to Seattle to talk about selling Netflix to Amazon. The meeting went well, and Jeff Bezos floated a price of $15 million,¡± tweeted Randolph, who was Netflix's first CEO as well.
He explained that even though talks with Amazon went well, the meeting made him and his business partner, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, realise that they were not yet ready to put their startup in the hands of somebody else.??
"That wouldn¡¯t have been a bad payday for less than 12 months work, but we thought we were on to something. We had finally gotten the engine to turn over so we weren¡¯t quite ready to put it in park and hand someone else the keys.Looking back, I know now that this trip was about much more than just selling the company. It turns out that there¡¯s nothing like having the option to get out that reinforces your desire to stay in.For Reed and I, this wasn¡¯t a sales trip. This was a commitment ceremony."
64-year-old Randolphalso shared about the incident in greater detail in a LinkedIn post shared yesterday.
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